Twenty Years of Knives
by Itty Bitty Albatross
Summary: Percy is thirteen when he's Reaped for the Hunger Games, and he feels what it's like to drown on dry land.


**Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson and the Olympians or The Hunger Games.**

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Percy was seven the first time he honestly noticed the Hunger Games. Up to that point, they were elusive, intangible, smoke on the wind that you smell and know of the existence of but that you couldn't feel against your skin.

It'd been twelve years since the very first set of games, twelve years his mother had gripped a chair between her rough working hands and pointedly stared at a shiny screen; from the time she was so young that the rebellion was as intangible to her as the games were to her child till the current, windy, ironically warm day. For seven of those years, she had ushered Perseus behind a counter or a shelf, behind the stiff, cheap paper of a book for the same rough amount of time every year, trying to preserve a little bit of safety—sanity—in the innocence of the green eyed child she loved more than life itself.

But the year Percy turned seven, a child from District IV, _home_, was reaped, and the games solidified into something sharp against his skin. Percy had to grow up very quickly, because the peacekeepers made sure every man, woman, and child watched the games (what good is an example, a threat, if no one paid any mind?), which meant that Percy, all elbows and eyes, with a fishhook looped through his cap, sat down on the scraggly rug between his mother's legs and watched an axe go through a child-he'd-once-played-with's stomach.

For a moment, he had been about to cry, but there was a small tap of something warm on the back of his neck—salty in the way only a boy who's been raised near the salt and the sea can tell—and he knew that he couldn't cry, too. He couldn't.

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There was a training room, dark chrome and menacing angles, monster embodied. Percy had stood near the corner and tried to figure out what he was going to do first, because there were so many things he didn't know, and he had no mentor to tell him what his priorities were. Every other tribute from 4 was dead, either by courtesy of the games or by self-inflicted wasting away. Percy was thirteen, and he'd learned that in the six years of devotedly watching the Hunger Games.

"Watch out." Someone, someone larger and scary, hissed at him. "Bastard."

That was a word Percy knew very well. His mother would put everyone else's to shame, but his father didn't exist, so he was branded as such. Everyone in District IV knew it, because his surname was 'Jackson' and his mother's 'Jack'. The suffix 'son' was only added to the child of unwed mothers, as a brand of shame that Percy pinned onto his nametag like a medal of honor. It was as if the worst thing anyone could ever call him was the truth, ridiculously.

Then someone hissed, "Son of a bitch." at his back, and that was the first time Percy had ever broken a bone.

Not his own, someone else's.

It was distressingly easy to hurt a stranger.

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His memory of being reaped was faded, like the photograph of his grandmother that Sally kept in a drawer, like the once-bright glass that washed ashore after a storm, having been dulled by the acidity in the water.

The picture was crisp and clean, but there was no sound. The last words that presided over the memory were those of the woman on the stand, calling "Perseus Jackson" over the tinny microphone.

It took a moment for that to sink in, and it did not even occur to Percy what had been said until the crowd shifted like the tide to look at him.

_'Oh,'_ Percy's mind said, late as always, '_that's me.'_

In the memory that ran through his brain and behind his mind every time he watched another reaping, every time he tried futilely to escape into the mock-death of sleep, he heard nothing. It was only when he was on the train heading away that he heard the things his body hadn't been capable of recording in the moment.

He'd recited a sea chantey under his breath as he climbed the stairs to keep from panicking, expending his breath like he thought it would be a quicker death to asphyxiate now than to be violently murdered on screen. One of the two would have to happen.

His mother had cried out, once, low. He froze the frame, taking in her pixelated face. She was beautiful as always, and she hadn't cried. No tears marred her face. To Percy, that was such a large rebellion it was a miracle that she wasn't shot on the spot, completing his death. If the peacekeepers knew what the thought process there was like Percy knew, she would have been. He could see the words hovering near her, a sworn promise to the real killers of her child, the dead-man-walking.

'You can take my boy, but you can't have my tears.'

Percy took them in, soaked them into his skin like lotion, and absorbed them to form a wall around his heart.

You can have my freedom, my heart, my life, but you can't have my tears.

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Her name was Annabeth, she was a career, and she asked him to call her Grey the first time they met. It was her own promise, one she whispered to him as they held each other deep in a ravine and away from the careers that at this point had turned on them.

Allies. Friends. They may have been lovers if things didn't have to shatter and break. Percy and Grey.

"Annabeth was what my family called me." She hummed into the dark near Percy's ear.

He jerked his head, understanding the girl from District III who had been raised for this, taught to kill and survive from the time she was old enough to be recognized as someone who may have made it out of the arena and snatched away from the brilliant father who only ever wanted his daughter to be safe. She didn't want to be called the name she held precious when she killed people, kids. She wanted to distance the Annabeth who wasn't going home and had officially died the moment that name was read off a scrap of paper, and the Grey who had slit the throat of a teenager on day one, after the gong sounded. They were two different people, for the sake of her and her father. Grey was the name she took, after the foreboding color of her eyes.

"Grey." Percy acknowledged, the first time he touched her when he took her hand and accepted her offer to join the careers for as long as that lasted.

"Grey." He murmured into the dark of the jagged stone walls when those same careers had turned on them, because only one person could get out of that arena with the soul still in their body.

Percy and Annabeth, the Bastard and Grey. What the tributes and the mentors and the sponsors saw them as, two faced children.

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Her name was Carrie. She was tall and skinny, tanned from the sun, and the first child—tribute, always say tribute—that Percy had to mentor.

He had no useful advice for her. He only got out on a stroke of luck and a sacrifice that still rendered him catatonic on some days. Carrie wasn't so lucky, so the first tribute he mentored was also the first one who died, as was usually the case.

The other mentors stood around, watching the action on large, sparkling screens that were the same thing he would have had at home, and they muttered their 'too bads' and 'sorrys' with little weight behind them. Even the mentor of the District IX tribute, who had snapped the neck of Percy's own, had apologized for something that wasn't his fault, not really.

The other tribute from his district, a boy named Dakota, had died in the bloodbath of the first day. What had Percy said? Stay away from the cornucopia. What had Dakota done? Run straight at it.

Percy downed a shot of something bitter, because Dakota was a smart, smart boy, and there was no way he forgot that diving in there with no weapon would mean his death.

Maybe Dakota had the right idea. Maybe Percy should have dove into the melee, taken a swift knife to the throat, and his body would have been shipped back to his mother like Dakota's was.

When the interviewer asked for his thoughts (in a quiet time when all the tributes were sleeping, and they needed something to air to remind people of something no one was likely to forget), he shifted and thought of Grey who might have lived if he had pulled a Dakota.

"He was never very bright." Percy lied, straight-faced, looking at woman with her vivid purple skin. "I don't know what he was thinking. Well, he wasn't thinking, I know that."

There. Percy Jackson just saved the life of a mother whose son had done something unforgivable in the eyes of the Capital. He had lied about a child who had been older than him and apparently wiser, because the Capital would have done the unspeakable for the offense of dying at the wrong time.

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Percy knew how to swim. Out to sea, there was quietness. There was a lull to the water that bobbed him up and down, tugging at his clothes, as if trying to persuade him to float out and never come back.

Was there safety out there, past the end of the district?

Percy didn't know. Wasn't about to go find out. At that point, he was twelve, and had gotten his name in the dish for the first time. He hadn't been reaped.

He took out tesserae every year. While Percy knew the lows when there wasn't enough food to be truly full, he never knew starvation. Sally worked her fingers to the bone to keep that from happening, and he took out tesserae as a little bit of compensation for her raising a child, alone, who she may lose very soon and very brutally.

Out here, on the water, he counted up the odds of him escaping being Reaped every year until he turned 18.

He wasn't very good at math, always being much better at keeping his head above water, but the odds were not in his favor.

Exactly one year later, he wasn't out on the water enjoying a little minute of freedom. He was getting his eyebrows waxed in a vague attempt at making the Capitol seem more like a city and less like a slaughterhouse.

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He was sixteen when the boy from District XII won. That was three years of tributes, six children who cycled through his care. He had to meet the eyes of their parents, to stare into the empty abyss of sorrow and apologize for their loss. He tried to project everything he felt into the apology, all the guilt. He had survived, their children hadn't, and he had no right to be standing there. There were two of them who had been older than him, four of them who were more talented or more driven. He had gone into the arena expecting to die but hadn't, and they had gone in striving to win and hadn't.

Nico Di Angelo ghosted his way through the arena, striking out of shadows. He had gotten a 3 for a training score and ended up killing a group of three careers who outweighed him by about a hundred pounds each. He was a coal miner's son, another bastard. He was seam, through and through, with olive skin and hair and eyes the color of coal.

Nico didn't hesitate over killing the boy from District IV that Percy had tried to prepare, but then the boy (Charles. He had a name, but at that point Percy tried not to remember it.) had tried to kill him first, so Percy didn't begrudge him the death. Percy could hardly call him a monster for killing in the arena: there was an old saying about pots, kettles and the color black.

Neither of Percy's mentored children made it into the top ten, so he could have been passed out drunk by the end of the games and no one would have noticed. They weren't likely to kick up a fuss over it; he was sixteen and had just lost another two people from his life, people he'd trained over and slaved over, trying his best to help them survive even as he knew that the kinder thing would have been to put a bullet through their brains.

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There was a time, once, when Percy had gotten caught out off shore, too deep, too weak. In District IV, kids were sent out to the deeper parts to retrieve things like buoys, to tow small lines. It was practice for when (if.) they were bigger.

He'd overestimated his skill. He couldn't keep swimming; the only way to go was down. Water everywhere, panicked mind, scrambling limbs. But somewhere deep in his mind, he'd been calm. Tranquil. There's a soothing aspect about water, a deceptive lull that makes you think you're safe and taken care of, even as the water rushes into your nose and mouth to kill you.

It was the same feeling as he was lead off the stage for the first time, into a room in the back. Two nameless, faceless peacekeepers ushered in the only person in the world that mattered right then. His mother's arms enveloped him, the only person in the room who fully realized that Percy was thirteen and shouldn't have to deal with this.

And Percy was drowning, again. He was drowning because both he and his mother knew that he wasn't coming back. He was skilled and driven and a good scrapper, but he was one out of two dozen, several of whom were stronger or more skilled, and all of whom had lives they desperately wanted to get back to.

They were wrong. Percy made it back, saw that room again, felt the sensation of water running into his lungs to stifle out the life again, when he swam and when he slept on the perfectly dry land.

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Annabeth was a fighter, she was trained for this. But after three days in the ring with Percy, she was willing to leave the careers she had aligned with in order to traipse the wilderness with him, knowing the two of them couldn't make it out.

That was Annabeth's choice.

Grey slept while Percy watched her, trusting that this sea-born boy wouldn't stab her in the back the way she'd never trusted in anything. When the careers came (Percy never memorized their names; he couldn't bring himself to commit that atrocity to their memory, to mar their names in his retelling of the story) they came loudly, never expecting Grey would pick Percy or he would pick her over their own lives.

Percy would have gladly taken a knife, an arrow, a fist to the face, if it meant the girl he'd learned to love could have gone home.

Grey—Annabeth—beat him to it.

He ran the words through his brain, holding her still-warm hand, staring in fury past the littered bodies of the careers he'd killed with their own weapons.

'They took me and they took her, but they can't take my tears'.

The salt water burned in his eyes like the water of home, water he wasn't going to get back to, but they didn't slip down his face. She'd kept her promise, remained Grey until the end, and he would keep his.

He couldn't beat the big battle, against the Capitol. Raging against them would mean trouble for more people than Percy even knew.

So this was how his world had to end: not with a bang, a fist, a war, but with a whimper.

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It was five years after Annabeth's death and two years after Nico Di Angelo's victory that Percy finally got to know Nico as a human.

He tripped over him, in fact. Both of their tribute's had died in the first ten (a personal anti-record for Percy), so Percy was on his way to try to escape to a little bit of sleep, and he'd face-planted on the lush carpet.

"Sorry." He was helped to his feet and was about to demand who the heck had parked themselves on the floor in the middle of a dim hallway when he saw the dark eyes rimmed in red, felt the salt water.

"Nico?" Percy tried the name on his tongue. It was harsh, mountainous in its consonants, unlike the rolling names of his home. "Are you okay?"

"No." Nico shook his head, then again. "I messed up. I've killed someone."

Percy slipped to the ground, partly because he wanted to sit down (he was bone-deep tired, worn with the stress of years' worth of emotional baggage and another two bags just got checked) and partly because it didn't look like Nico was going to stop talking, and at least on the ground they were slightly less likely to be overheard.

"We all have." Percy pointed out, scraping the words up out of his lungs.

"Not like that." Nico shook like a leaf, all lean lines and shrouded. "I said I wished I hadn't won. In my interview."

Percy sucked in a breath before the wash of sympathy-drowning swept over him. Poor tribute. Poor, broken tribute. You don't say things like that; maybe someday someone would say those things without fear of having their loved ones taken into a back room and smashed like flies. Percy knew that, Nico surely did, too—but mistakes happened, and Nico's lungs heaved with the attempt to get enough air past the coal dust that coated them.

"Who?" Percy barely got enough breath himself, to ask. He knew the answer: Nico was a bastard with a mother who'd died when he was young. There was only so many people to hurt, and Victors as a rule didn't marry or have kids, because then there are less people to lose.

"My sister." Nico coughed out the word, choking on it. He bowed his head, shoulders curving in, like if he could make himself small enough he could disappear.

Percy saw the brittle, the breakable, the breaking, in the boy who was shattering with a grief Percy couldn't have imagined if he tried. It seemed like losing a part of your heart would be the same for most cases. Percy'd seen the life flicker out of a pair of grey eyes, and he prayed to any god that might exist that he never stood in Nico's shoes, because losing his mother would have been a form of drowning he never would have surfaced from.

When he'd been drowning, as a child, a fisherman nearby had dove in and pulled him out, breathed the life back into him.

That night, Percy pulled Nico out of the water for a little bit, into his room. He tried his best to keep his head above the water and breathe the life back into him. However, he couldn't help knowing that—as Nico slid against him, curled up in the bed sheets and around each other, mouths latched onto the nearest bit of salt, be it tears or sweat—that Nico was keeping him above the water, too.

They were both survivalists. They had made a literal living out of using other people, of selfishly taking what they needed even if it hurt. Was it so wrong?

When morning dawned, Percy sat in bed, a stormy-patterned quilt around his left leg and a stormy-browed Victor around the other. Percy knew he surely thrashed during the night, through his nightmares, and he felt a growing bruise on his ribs from Nico's elbow when he'd gotten an unintentional thrash in return.

Lives rent of pain do not good bedmates make.

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His Victory Tour had been horrible. He'd had to see the homes of the people he'd killed, and those whom he'd benefitted from by their death. He'd seen the lives they left behind written on the shabby houses, the pain in the eyes of their friends and family.

It should have been him. If he'd had the choice to make, it would have been.

The worst was District III. There were grey eyes everywhere; each district had a 'look', a common staple to the appearance of its residents. Apparently, at this point in time, it was grey-eyed people in District of the girl who pretended her name was Grey.

All those familiar eyes were the eyes of the girl who took a knife for him, a knife that would have cut through his spine right at the small of his back.

All of them looked at him accusingly, even though he had never asked her to do so. He deserved the weight of all that guilt as it settled on his shoulders, like the earth onto Atlas, and he bore it until it became a background noise, like the wash of the sea.

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At his own home on the coast, he stood and held his mother—or maybe she held him, he wasn't sure.

"I'm sorry." She brushed a hand through his hair; it'd gotten long while he was in the arena, and his stylist decided to keep it. It went with the 'bad boy' image they tried to project for him.

He had no idea whether she was apologizing for him being reaped (not her fault), for him loving and then losing Annabeth (also not her fault), or for him being born in the first place (kind of her fault, but what kind of son would he be for blaming her for that? then again, his plan was to never have kids, lest he be the one in her shoes, which he wouldn't have been able to bear). It did not matter, whatever it meant, as apologies could not heal the wound torn.

He held her that much tighter, breathed in the air tinted with the scent of her cheap shampoo, so grateful to be back where he belonged.

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It became something that always happened for Percy and Nico, every year, for the amount of time they needed that comfort.

The day after the first night spent in each other's arms, things were awkward. They shifted around each other, caught in a quicksand section and on sinking ground. Then, the girl from District XII died, and Percy crossed the room of Mentors standing around, eating and trying to bargain a good sponsor to slip a hand in Nico's. A little selfish comfort offered, and accepted with a squeeze.

It became a pattern, a solid, the quicksand solidifying again.

The days would be spent watching the games, swallowing back the nausea of memory. Occasionally there would be gripped hand, an arm over a shoulder, a stressed embrace.

The nights were spent together. Comfort and shared bodies, learned tastes and feels. Nightmares were bad, but not unbearable, and it was a loved one to wake up to in the morning.

When the games ended (or were supposed to end; they never truly did, did they?), they went home. They went back home to separate districts where nobody waited. Percy never wanted anyone else, and Nico must not have, either. That was before most Victors became the slaves of the Capitol in body as well as mind, so they were free to share with who they wanted.

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After a few years, a tribute under Percy's care won. She was a nice woman, older, only a couple years younger than him. Her name was Magdalene, and she was fierce, unrelenting.

Percy and Mags got along well enough. It was someone to share the burden of mentoring with, if nothing else. There were times when she looked like she wanted to say something, to speak the truth about the Capitol and its cruelties, but she was always too smart to do so.

"I like her." Percy admitted to Nico one night, trailing a finger around Nico's chest, delighting in the goose bumps that rose in his wake.

Nico hummed in response, then, "I hope she's careful." He pressed a kiss to the top of Percy's head for the unspoken part: 'because you've lost enough people to them'.

It was over ten years later that Nico mentored his own Victor. Haymitch, who had no family when all was said and done. Nico stood in front of the large screens, arms crossed, knowing that this may be the one that beat all the odd. Percy rubbed the tension out of his shoulders, paused, and carefully traced the words into Nico's collarbone.

_I love you._

Words he hadn't said since Annabeth, not risking giving that to anyone else for fear that those in power would see, and would strike at that weak spot if given a chance.

Nico froze. After a moment, the tension drained away like water out of cupped hands.

'Same'. He said it out loud, but quiet enough that none of the other Victors mulling about would hear. They all knew that the two stayed by each other during the games, but there was no point in arming a person who may not be a friend.

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Percy saw the 32nd Hunger Games. It was his last. Nico's, too.

Percy's mother died that spring. His tributes died. Snow was now president, the games were becoming crueler than ever, and Nico'd been to a doctor and his lungs weren't lasting. They would keep him breathing a year, maybe two, if he was lucky.

"Don't let this go on." He had told—begged—Mags. She wanted to be free, wanted her family free too. She knew what he was planning, because the only reason he would talk about open rebellion was because he wasn't afraid of death any longer. "End the games."

It was his final wish. He took the poison from a fish, hoping that he wouldn't get caught in the next hour. They put it in a bottle of wine. Percy (always the gentleman), drank first.

Again, there was the selfish need to not be left behind.

Percy taught Nico the sea chantey, the one he hummed on his way onto the stage and into the games, while he held his lover and drifted out of the games at last.

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Mags kept a seashell, a pretty little thing, sun bleached, on a tabletop. Finnick asked about it once.

Mags had to be careful, now, to pronouns all the words right. With less teeth, there was less hard feeling around the vowels.

"That belonged to my mentor, Perseus."

"What was he like?" Finnick had a black eye. A 'client' had gotten a little rough, and Percy's words rang in her mind. Up until then, she'd been trying to keep Finnick out of the firing zone and innocent of any knowledge. That idea fled when she saw Percy's grin on Finnick's face. They were so very alike.

"He was very brave. He gave me a challenge, once, that I've recently had an offer of help on. Would you like to help bring down the Capitol?"

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**A/N: Inspiration from kaikamahine's 'Pistol For A Mouth'. Please read and review. Did you like the crossover?**

**Tobi.**


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